Ever since, Nadella’s appointment as CEO in 2014, he’s made 3 acquisitions in each of the divisions mentioned above including Github, which I believe lies within Intelligent Cloud.

Acquisitions

The blue marked ones are the largest acquisition Microsoft made till that time. The ones in red are the attempts which largely failed to yield the results.

To make space and re-align the organisation, a series of layoffs happened: 2014(18000), 2015(8,500) and 2016(1,850). Recently two new divisions have been created as part of the process: Experiences & Devices along with Cloud + AI.

Open Source

They also have actively contributed towards open source being largest contributors on Github as of 2017 report :

Dot Net was open sourced in 2014 along with lots of ML frameworks, VS code and several other tools.

Story

Microsoft under Nadella is a different beast and their game plan since Nadella has been totally opposite of Ballmer.

Contrary to other opinions, their acquisitions are very much in line with what Microsoft has been up to internally for quite some time & results have been encouraging.

They are playing a game between productivity, cloud and leveraging ML wherever possible using data. Just the access to the data regarding languages, merge histories, commits etc will be incredibly useful to understand and make possible something like commit assist from Ubisoft available on a larger scale.